Amazon Silk revisited: Is the “split” cloud browser any faster?

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When the Kindle Fire came out last month, one of the biggest disappointments users had was that Amazon’s promise of “ultra-fast web browsing” seemed to be all talk. In our original testing we found that Silk was actually slower going through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud servers than just connecting to the web directly. Amazon’s position on the whole thing was that Silk would get faster as the back end accumulated more data to cache and predict user behavior. We’ve been using Silk for the last month, so let’s see how it’s doing.

How Silk is supposed to work

As a brief refresher, Amazon is looking to leverage the might of its huge computing cloud, known as EC2, to accelerate page loads on the Kindle Fire. When a user calls up a site, the query actually goes to Amazon’s servers first, which then serve up the content.

By going this route, Amazon has the ability to cache popular content, and mainline it right down to the tablet. EC2 is connected to the backbone architecture of the internet, offering theoretically much faster access to almost any site out there. If it has the content you need, a smaller portion of a page would need to be loaded for each individual request. Furthermore, Amazon also suggests that JavaScript execution and page rendering can also be offloaded to EC2.

The entire scheme, on paper, seems to hang together perfectly. Amazon’s cloud is not bound by bandwidth or CPU limits like a mobile device is. It should be able to reach out and grab almost any content you need and then push it down a persistent connection to the Silk browser faster than can be. In actuality, though, it didn’t work so well when the Kindle Fire originally launched.

The test

To test how the Kindle Fire’s browser is performing these days, we have it connected to the same WiFi network as last time, and Adobe Flash is turned off. The cache was cleared before loading a new page, and also in between cloud and non-cloud tests to ensure there was no advantage bestowed. We loaded each site three times, both with and without cloud acceleration turned on, and the numbers we discuss will be the average of those values.

We started by retesting the sites from last time. ExtremeTech loaded in 12 seconds with no AWS assistance — the same ballpark as last time. Interestingly, with AWS turned on, we saw almost exactly the same load time, 12.25 seconds. That’s certainly a notable change from our previous test where the non-cloud load time was several seconds faster. A fluke? Let’s continue.

The full CNN front page has quite a lot of content to load, and this time we got a 9 second load with no cloud acceleration, but 8.5 seconds with AWS enabled. That’s right, Amazon’s cloud actually made things slightly faster. Considering last time AWS was clearly slower, this is certainly not bad. This is the promise of Amazon’s cloud acceleration, though the gap is small.

Tagged In

I think Amazon lost sight of what they should have done and that is offering Fire users service-type apps handled quickly by AWS (currency conversions, search results, on-line games, and the like). This garbage of somehow accelerating the Internet by funneling all of your traffic through their servers is garbage. I also think users concerned about privacy and not wanting the cloud imposed on them will opt for the Nook Tablet as opposed to the Amazon Fire. In fairness, users can disable using Amazon as a proxy but how many typical users will even understand the option when we’re still trying to get people to stop being so complacent with posting sensitive information on non-secure sites?

Anonymous

I think Amazon lost sight of what they should have done and that is offering Fire users service-type apps handled quickly by AWS (currency conversions, search results, on-line games, and the like). This garbage of somehow accelerating the Internet by funneling all of your traffic through their servers is garbage. I also think users concerned about privacy and not wanting the cloud imposed on them will opt for the Nook Tablet as opposed to the Amazon Fire. In fairness, users can disable using Amazon as a proxy but how many typical users will even understand the option when we’re still trying to get people to stop being so complacent with posting sensitive information on non-secure sites?

Anonymous

I think Silk would have worked a lot better if it was 3G device like a phone, instead of Wifi it is on now. As it should work a lot better on slow network connections. Maybe the author of the article could test it on a slow link as well ?

Artie

Silk is not a great browser but it’s adequate. That’s about the best I can say for it.

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